Jayakaran Mukundan

Malaysian TESL Students' Challenges: Instructional Use of Video Production

Aims: The study aims at identifying the challenges with which Malaysian students of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) are faced before, during and after stages of video production process. Study Design: Interpretive. Methodology: In this study an interpretive analysis was done on daily journals and observations of 42 Malaysian TESL students producing a video of a scene of a Shakespearean play, Macbeth. Peer assessment was then applied in order to give students a chance to evaluate their peers’ work. Results: The findings revealed that students encountered various difficulties before, during and after production stages which should be taken into account in teacher training programs. Conclusion: The findings are useful for teachers and teacher education institutions involved in teaching the use of digital video to enhance pedagogy. This study suggests that TESL students should perhaps be exposed to basic video production techniques from early stages of their teacher training in order to be prepared to integrate video production in their future classes to enhance student learning.

Material for Teaching Writing

Writing in the strict sense of the word is derived from speech, and is, in fact, an imperfect visual representation of it, for such purpose as communication at a distance and the keeping of records. Writing is the only conventional device for recording sounds. Writing can be fun, students or learners should not worry about the perfection of the sentences and the logical development of ideas. In real writing situations, people write unplanned without revising or editing their writings such as formal letters, educational or some meetings notes, instructions, and examination papers.

Developing Reading Materials for ESL Learners

This chapter discusses the issue of material preparation for a language reading course. It elaborates on some of the important elements that material developers should take into account in selecting and presenting the reading materials. Provision of materials is discussed in terms of the topics to be included and the vocabulary components of the content materials. More specifically, it discusses such topic-related issues as reader interest, needs, and schema that have been found as key success in reading activity. It also deals with the selection and presentation of vocabulary items that have proven to significantly affect reading performance.

A Pedagogic Corpus Analysis: Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Malaysian English Textbooks.

The adoption of task-based teaching in Indonesia classrooms has not been widely accepted for two major grounds. First, teachers seem to cast some doubts as to what degree such an approach can contribute to their students’ language development. Second, classroom management issues, such as discipline and noise become another challenge to cope with. While these issues deserve serious attention, teachers’ unwillingness to venture the use of tasks seems to put their awareness of the learning process at stake. It is through task-based teaching, students’ language development can be nurtured. This study is an attempt to probe the benefits of using two types of communicative tasks: picture comparison and picture drawing. The study involving two female Taiwanese native speakers learning English found that the interactional mechanisms created through a task and, negotiation of meaning provided a potentially rich forum for students’ language development. There are at least two prime elements accounting for this benefit. First, the type of direct indicators employed by the student creates linguistic urgency fostering the limit of their language capacity, and the use of embedded negotiation of meaning promotes students’ active involvement. Second, one way communicative tasks, to some degree, can yield greater opportunities for students to negotiate, thus enriching acquisition. Keywords : negotiation of meaning, communicative tasks.

Technology Integration: Yet to Happen at Malaysian Universities

Technology has the potential of “appealing to different learning styles and pro-offering individualized input to accommodate the learner internal variables that are crucial to the input-to-intake process.” (Zhao 2005, p. 98). Both the learners and teachers can benefit from technology application in language classes; teachers will enjoy the ease of delivering teaching materials and learners will enjoy the autonomous anytime-anywhere learning accompanied with the variety of authentic materials. This paper tends to investigate the factors encouraging or inhibiting University Putra Malaysia (UPM) lecturers to integrate technology in their language classes. The instrument applied in this study is a questionnaire composing of 4 different sections. Section 1 elicits the demographic details of participants, section 2 measures their perceptions about diffusion of innovation based on Roger’s model, section 3 measures participants’ technology application based on The National Educational Technology Standards For Teachers and finally section 4 derives information about the type of technology they apply in their classes. Data collected was used to examine the factors influencing UPM lecturers’ perception about technology application. Our analysis of data proved that although the participants were all familiar with technology, they did not integrate it much in their classes which may be explained by cultural beliefs.